“If I can buy a Raspberry Pi so cheaply, why would I ever use an Arduino for an electronics project?”

I often hear this from people who are new to embedded programming and electronics. This post is the first of two, aimed at beginners in the embedded world. We’ll go over some of the differences between a typical Arduino and a Raspberry Pi, and the reasons you might want to use one or the other for a project.

Ian from Dangerous Prototypes has put a great series of day-to-day blog posts up on the Hacker Camp mini-site explaining the full program, so I won’t bore you by repeating them. Needless to say he and Jin, and the other organisers, did an insanely great job of showing us all the things they love about living in Shenzhen. I want to highlight just a few things from the trip that stood out for me.